This invention pertains to aggregated computing systems and other information handling systems and, more particularly, to an aggregated server blade system having a multi-tiered boot list from which boot order is established for each of a plurality of server blades in the system.
Over the last two decades, the cost of computing hardware has continued to drop. During the same period, the price of maintenance and operations has increased. Today many computing devices are frequently purchased, deployed and managed in a scattered, ad-hoc manner. The cost to maintain such hardware is staggering. Industry analyst firm Meta Group estimates that maintenance and operations for a company's end-user environment can account for 80% of IT costs. For example, the average desktop PC maintenance costs a business between $2,000 and $5,000 per PC, per year, per person.
Aggregated server blade systems go a long way toward addressing the maintenance and operational costs associated with hardware. Yet, traditional aggregated server blade systems can be difficult to maintain and can be quite inflexible when it comes to selecting boot devices for each of the blades in the system. At present, when it is desired to change the boot order for devices which are accessible to each blade, an administrator must login to each blade server and reconfigure the boot list for each blade. This can be a time-consuming and frustrating task for any administrator and drives up the cost of maintenance for an aggregated server blade system.
Security aspects of aggregated server systems remain a vital concern. Applicants have recognized, at the onset, that any proposed system which intends to simplify the administrative tasks surrounding boot lists in such server systems must do so without introducing security leaks.
Traditional aggregated server blade systems share access to a single USB DVD ROM drive. In the traditional arrangement, the DVD ROM drive can only be accessed by one blade at a time. Accordingly, booting from the DVD ROM drive is restricted to a serialized one-blade-at-a-time process where more than one blade requires access to the DVD ROM drive. In any scenario which results in the well-known boot storm problem where all blades in an aggregated server blade system are directed to simultaneously boot from the single DVD ROM drive, since the boot process is serialized from blade to blade, some of the server blades will experience an inordinate amount of time before being able to boot.
For example, today, the UpdateXpress CD performs updates one blade at a time. It currently takes three hours, on average, to complete one BIOS update for 14 blades. Where a critical update is required in order to continue processing at all of the server blades, such as when a network-spreadable virus has been detected, this three-hour delay manifests into a three-hour downtime period. Clearly, such downtime would not be permissible in critical computing applications such as Web hosting.